


pishacha

by rhapsodies



Category: Original Work
Genre: Blood and Violence, F/F, Immortality, Multi, Religion, Rich People Rich Peopling
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-12
Updated: 2021-01-12
Packaged: 2021-03-16 20:08:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,502
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28712538
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rhapsodies/pseuds/rhapsodies
Summary: Being haunted, as it turns out, is terribly inconvenient.
Relationships: An Immortal Holy Being/A Much Less Holy Being of Uncertain Divinity, Original Female Character/Original Female Character
Comments: 2
Kudos: 3





	pishacha

**Author's Note:**

  * For [chandane](https://archiveofourown.org/users/chandane/gifts).



Here is a story that Zaydel sometimes tells at dull salons:

When she had still lived outside of the city’s towering walls, she had suffered a terrible case of bad luck. The type that just wouldn’t be charitable and go away, you know? It was almost impossible to live with; it followed her around, chased her footsteps. Doors would swing themselves closed on their own say-so, windows would shatter noisily in their brackets, and once she awoke to her entire suite ankle-deep in river water. The serving girls had been plying bracken and tiny fish from between the floorboards for weeks. It becomes such an inconvenience that one night she agrees to her patron Ammani – who, despite having very little sense, was inordinately wealthy and a passable lay – bringing in a spiritualist to try and exorcise whatever it was that was doing its best to bother her into an early grave.

But something had to be done: twice this week already they’d had good servants quit. “It’s not right,” one of them had whispered, making the peasant ward against evil, like Zaydel’s unfortunate situation was catching.

Now the first thing this spiritualist says is: “Blood, to appease the spirits!” and slices this tiny, hidden dagger across Zaydel’s palm, fast enough that she doesn’t know it happens until it starts seeping out onto the table, and one of the newer guests starts shrieking so much that they completely pass out onto the floor. So everything gets a bit muddled for a moment, because they have to move him up away from where he could get stepped on. Apparently, in doing so, Zaydel severs the holy circle of protection or whatever it was, because the chandelier, this huge electric monstrosity brought in from the capital, whined uneasily for a second before exploding itself violently and littering glass all over.

The spiritualist was clearly an overpaid quack after all, because once their skin leaches to a hideous grey they decide it’s about time _they_ fainted, too. Their head collapses next to the candle of divine sacrament, whose flame is gyrating scandalously. Zaydel tries to push away from the table but underneath the flickering light _something_ detaches itself from the Nawab’s hideous nouveau walls, slithering its way towards her and pinning her down at the wrists. And all this time, that ridiculous little nick keeps oozing blood, except it isn’t oozing at all, it’s like an awful, metallic wave, enough of it that she should’ve been dead twice over. The thing in the shadows croons something in a language she doesn’t understand, and for a moment she’s abruptly sure she’s about to really and properly die until Ammani’s slightly uglier twin has the presence of mind to flip over the entire oaken table.

“It’s all so romantic,” one of the guests sighs dreamily.

“Very fashionable,” another one agrees, dusting off her veil.

The spiritualist sat themselves up woozily and pointed a shaking finger at Zaydel “You are cursed,” she intoned deeply. “Your blood is cursed – the Gods do not smile up you,” and Zaydel laughs because, honestly, didn’t she already know this? But in her hurry to escape, the old hack sweeps her robes past the toppled candle. She goes up like a wick, _whoosh!_ and of course they do try to get her out through the wide doors towards the pond but she’s so panicked, her skin starting to bubble and melt, that she runs into a wall and the fire catches onto the curtains – rich and deep red, this once-in-a-lifetime Persian silk – and before Zaydel even knew it, the entire room was merrily ablaze.

Of course, Zaydel herself makes it out to garden with its little manicured topiary animals without so much as a bruise, the cut notwithstanding. But it turned out that Ammani had gotten turned about in the thick smoke and choked to death, and then the twin hung themselves from the entryway chandelier before the funeral had even left the planning stages. Worst of all were the curtains: once they’d pulled the crisped-up bodies out of the ballroom, she’d gone to see if there was anything to be done about them. But between the black marks and the scoring, she’d had to face it: they were completely ruined.

* * *

The Bringer of Light’s eternal children are supposed to know things that no mortal should, but even after all this time Zaydel doesn’t feel as wise or as sacred as she’s supposed to. There are others of them, that’s for sure, but if there’s some sort of divine initiation then Zaydel’s useless errand boy must’ve misplaced her invite. Sometimes she thinks that the world is splintering around her: a hundred different directions, different people, different choices, and then everything rearranges itself from what could be to what _is_. If this is sacred knowledge, then she’s no good for interpreting it. If she’d wanted an oracle, the Mother should’ve just chosen someone else.

After the ordeal with the Nawab’s palace, Zaydel tries to return to her Maker’s warm bosom, or whatever it is that she’s supposed to be doing, but even when she’s _trying_ she can’t see the right path. She’s been kicking up a fuss in this temple for long enough that the assorted sewadars have started to get a little twitchy. One of them, a sweet little thing with eyes like pennies, even asked her if she was needing somewhere to stay.

And she’s thinking of taking up the offer when the rows of little tea-lights gutter, expelling a quick huff of air before they all go out at once. The chattering of the sewadars fades entirely. Don’t look, she tells herself: looking first is an admission of failure.

It’s hard to remember why any of that should matter when at last the figure drops to the candles in front of her. The woman – for it is a woman, Zaydel is reasonably sure, her skin strangely flecked with gold like an egg – reaches out to guide the match in Zaydel’s hand to the nearest wick. The sudden burst of flame is surprising. It shouldn’t be, but there it is.

“Slow down. You’re thinking about it all wrong.” The woman says. Her voice is pleasantly low, but the buttery sheen to her eyes is distracting, melting into diverging rings that spin ever so dizzyingly. “Try not to think about this like a mortal would. It’s too predictable: you need to try harder than that.”

“I _am_ trying,” Zaydel hisses. Besides, it hasn’t been so long since she was plucked from the masses for – whatever this is. A few months, at most. A year or so.

“Are you very sure?” the woman asks dubiously.

“Can’t you just take me to the damned doorway?” she snaps, trying to shake off the woman’s grip.

Slowly, the woman’s shimmering hand wraps around Zaydel’s to clasp them in her own. “Slowly,” she says again, her voice crackling like faulty wiring. “You need to let go. There’s no gate, or divine pathway, that will take you there. There’s only _you_.”

 _Fanatic_ , she thinks: the beautiful ones always are. “Are you propositioning me?” she asks.

The woman’s laugh is as surprising as her voice. It echoes around the temple, from the stone floor to the rafters and the pipes hidden up there. The deft touch of her fingers is light on Zaydel’s palms, spilling up her forearms like the slick of oil. Zaydel watches them move curiously, even as they travel their way along to her shoulder, her collarbone, the dip between them. She wonders if the other woman can feel the thrum of Zaydel’s heart. Or if that, too, was taken away. She lets the other woman lean even closer, mouth pressing against the inconvenient shell of Zaydel’s ear, palms splayed either side of the neck. Undoubtedly: the woman could sever her long, long thread. But Zaydel tilts her head obligingly.

“Do I need to?” the woman asks, and then, sternly, “Watch,” as suddenly reality tears itself apart, sinking its teeth into the soft parts of her and ripping them open until everything inside pours out, blood and fat and the thick tubing of her stomach. When the earth reforms under her feet, she’s alone.

* * *

Some time after this, there is a woman waiting outside of the temple. Her skin trickles with dazzling bursts of golden light, and even more of it spills into her long hair.

“There you are,” she says, leaning insouciantly against the white brick. “I’ve been waiting for you.”

Zaydel studies her curiously. Says: “I should warn you – I’m known to be cursed.”

* * *

Sometimes, Kasha looks at her like she wants to drive her hands inside and crash their bodies together like a ship on rocks. Insurance fraud. Occasionally Zaydel wonders if this means that Kasha would come away with her, if she asked; but she’s never known how to say it. There is so much she wants to say that she might never say any of it at all. The words are sticky in her mouth, like someone else put them there. Cheap. It’s humiliating that she even thought of it. Still, the thought is there.

A room. A small farming town, in the outer reaches of the city. The lurid heat of summertime blowing its way in from the window. It’s dusk, maybe, or even a little later. The netting is doing a truly terrible job, and tangles in their legs. Kasha’s laugh is easier here than it was in the temple, blooming out into the night. Her eyes are darker, too, lined with kohl, and there is an unnatural glitter to them: like good luck, like earth after a heavy rain. She says Kasha’s name, just to test it out, and barely recognises the scratch of her own voice. Kasha’s fingers, her sharply dangerous nails, press lightly against Zaydel’s mouth. Zaydel knows better than to let them in. But she lets Kasha press her even closer, lets her untangle the sheets and the useless netting, and Zaydel isn’t sure what to do with her hands so she runs them along the bare expanse of Kasha’s back. The light suffuses between her fingers. She has a passing thought of their long lives – how absurd, to think of lovers who have not yet come to exist – until Kasha’s mouth tires of Zaydel’s neck and begins its steady, inevitable descent downwards. As ever, Kasha takes her time, stopping to draw her tongue across skin or to press her teeth, lightly, into a hidden mark. She goes slowly, even when Zaydel’s body runs through with tension, and every part of her that Kasha touches is opening, and opening, and opening.

* * *

“I don’t think you want to hear this, sweet thing,” Avinash says seriously, rising out of his languid sprawl like the bed is a pool of water. “But all this – the morbidity, the _moping_ – it’s starting to get a little gauche. Look,” and he gestures to himself expansively, “my skin is starting to get pallid just in sympathy.”

Zaydel tries to stare him down, which is made much harder by the protective shell of the sheets around her.

“Don’t give me that look, I told you that you wouldn’t like it.” Zaydel watches him and the sullen quietness of his mouth. The cloth of his open robe is sheer and incandescent; the Maharaja must’ve paid his own not inconsiderable weight in gold just for a roll of it, and then wasted it on Avinash’s insurmountable vanity. Avinash touches the side of his face consideringly and drops the robe to preen in front of the mirror, like a coin rubbed to a burnish.

“Please stop whatever is you’re doing,” she says, plaintive and muffled by the weight of the silk.

One of His Majesty’s other concubines takes this opportune moment to pipe up. “What happened to her?” she asks curiously, trailing her fingers along Zaydel’s bare calf. Zaydel angles her head around to stare: she is _right here_.

“Oh, this and that,” Avinash says vaguely.

Zaydel kicks the foolish girl out of her bed and onto the floor. “My heartstrings have been irrevocably cut by an evil temptress.”

“Oh, that sounds ever so troublesome.”

“Precisely,” Avinash says agreeably, twisting himself with immodest surety. The parts of him not hidden by the glamour shimmer malevolently in the late morning sun. He adds, “You should get out of this room some time, my dear. I hate to be frank, but it’s beginning to smell like an aging whore in here.”

“Familiar, are we?”

Avinash, ignoring her, takes a step away from the mirror and continues to study himself critically. “Sometimes,” he sighs, “I think it’s very hard to be so beautiful,” and naturally, dodges the downy pillow that Zaydel throws with divine aim at his head. It is, she thinks, particularly apt. Focus lost, she returns to staring despondently at the plate of food her serving girl has left. Thick slices of bread, liberally spread with fresh butter. That too, ruined.

If she hadn’t been so distracted by the exhausting remembrance of Kasha’s betrayal, she would have noticed Avinash beginning to sift through the piles of fabric left on the floor. But such is the way of things.

“I hope you will tell me that this was a gift,” Avinash says incredulously, holding up a set of ceremonial robes. It’s only then that he discovers the costume from three seasons ago, or maybe four, done in the European style, and makes a noise like a winded pack-donkey. “When they pluck your body from the ashes,” he tells her, emptying the entire offending pile out of the window, “the gossip will discuss first your unimaginable sexual deviance, and then it will end with, ‘but did you see what she was wearing?'” After that, he decides that her malignant morosity is better cured by a day’s sunlight than her sulking indoors, and he escorts her outside with the air of a benevolent young guard.

“Behold!” he declares with unnecessary drama. “A tree! Look at it closely: you might even remember them.”

“Honestly, Avinash, you’d almost think that I’d been locked inside a damned convent,” Zaydel says. The arms of the tree bend themselves towards her obligingly, and she plucks an apple.

He frowns, unable to hide his distaste. “I would never think so lowly of you.”

A terrible thought strikes her, and she stops the promenade. “Do you think I’ve gone soft?”

“No?” Avinash says doubtfully.

“You’re lying to me, aren’t you? You know that I can always tell.”

“I don’t want to discourage you on this day of progress,” he tells her gallantly, and holds out his arm for her to take.

Somehow, they arrive in the centre of the city even though they take nothing but winding back-alleys littered with shanty houses, and when they do there is a party in full swing. Colourful cloth banners are tied between the tallest buildings; an explosion of brightly dyed petals has left them floating in the air and trailed underfoot. Someone is playing music nearby. It leaks out of the window and into the streets. The thought of it seems inconceivable: she wants to ask them how they can wake up and know that none of it is even worth doing and simply get on with it anyway. The incomprehensible human spirit, she supposes.

Some of the confetti has already landed in Avinash’s mop of hair. The hazy noon light suits him, catching on the chain links between his nose and ear. When he turns to look at her, it snags on the black depths of his eyes and spins them into gold, too. Since their exile, it’s been easier to think less on their half-lives and more on getting him to laugh, wide and ridiculous and unguarded. For the first time, she realises that perhaps these things go both ways.

As always, Avinash is holding out his hand with thoughtless expectance. He says, “They’re _dancing_ , you depraved ghoul, let’s not just hide back here,” and pulls her out into the sun and the crowd and the light.

* * *

Zaydel doesn’t remember very much of her mortal days. Now, it isn’t really her fault – between the Eternal Blessing, and the still-excruciating misery of a drawn-out death, and then the weight of a few hundred years, she’s had other things on her mind. More than any one lifetime. And most of it _so_ forgettable; who would want to dwell on it? There’s a certain wisdom to only inhabiting the current moment, she’s found. It simply isn’t sensible to pry too closely into the affairs of the Seer.

But sometimes, there is a memory:

Her father had worked the farm. His hands were never clean. Dirt in the nails. Before her mother died on the birthing bed and the child with her, he hung a small shard of gleaming metal on the wall above. Idolatry is forbidden. There are things beyond the seeing of mortal eyes, but he places it there anyway. For luck, he said. The Bringer of Light is said to be forgiving of that sort of thing. 

She believes this, utterly, because she is small and young and her father is all she has left. She believes it until the men come and rouse them from their beds, spit _heretic_ at them both and _can’t you make her stop?_ when the clatter of steel causes her traitorous eyes to cry. Even then, she believes it. She thinks she believes it until the first prick of the knife, or maybe the lick of the flames. Always, she believes it, until a hand scoops her out and whispers in a thousand echoing voices: _No._

But that had all been before.

* * *

The stairs to the summit had been empty. Even the end of Inanna’s war has not taken them, or the old temple waiting at the peak. Zaydel had spared one useless second to look out on the city below: at the people scurrying like rats to leave, and the many devouring mouths of the sky, and the fire pouring from every maw. She watched the storm topple one of the spires of the palace into the waiting mass below.

The city was burning, but Kasha would be at the temple. There was nothing Zaydel could do for these people now. Even if they survived, Inanna has refused to guide them. Presumably, this is so that they will be free. Freedom, she thinks, is ever so dull.

“Kasha!” she called, unshackling her sword and leaving the scabbard in the angry dust. “Kasha!” The summit is quieter than she has ever known it. But the light of Kasha’s eyes draws her forward, like a harbour, like safer shores than she has ever known.

“Zaydel,” Kasha says, as pleasantly as she can with Avinash’s blade singing against her neck. “Did you get lost? I’ve been waiting for you.”

Avinash is turned towards the sound of Zaydel’s voice. There is a wry twist to his mouth that she doesn’t recognise, and a thin line of red at the point of his sword. He says, “If I’d known it was going to be the end of the world, I would’ve dressed up. Whatever took you so long?”

“Oh, you know,” Zaydel says, “I’ve just been having the most awful day,” and curiously, it’s this that she thinks of when Kasha’s throat glistens and splits apart, and when she drives her blade up to the hilt in her only friend’s stomach, twisting it sharply until redness dribbles inelegantly from his mouth.

The stone floor is not clean. Neither is her shirt. Both are soaked through, ruined, two more things she can never get back. A lurid spray of it has even made its way up the eastern wall, towards the burning sky and the distant fate of mankind. As always, the spirits are wholly wrong: of all the cursed blood trickling away, none of it is her own.

* * *

“You don’t look very haunted to me, darling,” the new Maharaja tells her during a lull in the music. Is he new? She isn’t sure. “But if you are, you should stay here for a while longer. You know, sometimes they say that a resident ghost is good luck!”

Around them is a collection of masked debutantes and husbands looking to escape their wives. The light – electric – careens wildly up the walls. None of them are recent arrivals to court, exactly, but Zaydel doesn’t remember any of their names; still, the crowd holds their breath. Here is something that she only considers when she is too drunk to remember: that none of this is real. Equally: that it is. She isn’t sure which would be worse. Now, as always, she feels the press of fingers behind the locked door in her breastbone, or her stomach, or her wrists. _You’ll have to wait_ , she tells them, _I’m busy._

“Oh, I don’t know if you want that,” she says. “I hear this sort of thing is catching.”

Everyone laughs. They think she’s joking.

**Author's Note:**

> [points at God] gay now


End file.
